“Well, all my friends are gone,” Seth said. “But they did all gang up and murder me. True friends don’t really do that.”
“They couldn’t help it,” Jenny said. “They were under Ashleigh’s spell.”
“Could she really keep that many people under control at once?” Seth said. “She got them going, but it’s not like they tried real hard to stop themselves. I mean, they kept coming at you, right?”
“At first,” Jenny said.
Seth wolfed down a Salisbury slice. Jenny barely had any appetite.
“What’s it like having your parents in town again?” Jenny asked.
“Back to the old family sitcom. Mom’s medicated and talking on the phone with her old sorority friends. Dad’s drunk and talking to my great-grandfather’s ghost. Or fighting with Mr. Burris about the stupid bank. They try to parent me around like they didn’t just leave me by myself since Christmas.”
“Do they know we’re still together?” Jenny said.
“That’s kind of hard to do,” Seth said. “Last time my mom saw you, she was busting you with cocaine at our Christmas party.”
“It wasn’t mine!” Jenny said. “It was Ashleigh’s. And not even hers, but some of your stupid preppy rich-kid friends.”
“Not my friends,” Seth said. “My parents and their parents are friends. And not even real friends, most of them, it’s just business.”
“Whatever,” Jenny said.
“I told them what really happened,” Seth said. “But they don’t believe me.”
“Because Ashleigh was such a perfect angel.”
“And you’re a wicked devil, trying to suck out my soul.” Seth grabbed Jenny, bit at her head and made sounds like a starving zombie.
“Stop it!” Jenny slapped him, but not very hard, and she let her fingers linger on his face for a second. She was wearing gloves for school, as always. “I’m eating.”
“Actually, you’re not.”
“I was thinking about it.”
“I also heard prom might be canceled,” Seth said.
“Could be,” Jenny said. “I killed the whole prom planning committee.”
“Jenny!” Seth looked around. “You can’t just say that out in public.”
“There’s nobody close by. Nobody would sit near us if we asked them to.” Jenny looked around at the scattered little groups of people. There was no big central crowd at the picnic tables now, orbiting Ashleigh like she was the sun. Everybody had broken off into tiny clumps here and there. The entire social order of the school had been destroyed.
A lot of people, like Darcy Metcalf, sat all alone—Darcy’s main purpose in life had been to suck up to Ashleigh Goodling. Isolated people like Darcy seemed to have no friends left in the world, which was just the way Jenny had been most of her life. She felt sick.
“Everyone’s talking about how many people are missing,” Seth said. “The news made it sound like it was only a few deaths, and with the phones out, people didn’t realize just how many people—”
“Okay, Seth!” Jenny said. “I get it. It was a lot of people. I think I’m going to puke now.”
“Sorry.” He rubbed a hand along her back. “I think a lot of people are skipping, too, though. I mean, who really wanted to come back?”
“It’s so weird now,” Jenny said. “I just feel sick all the time, thinking about what I did. It’s going to be like this forever, too. What can I even do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish somebody knew,” Jenny said. “I wish somebody could tell me.”
And then the bell rang.
In her dream, Jenny rode in the back of a cart towards the center of Athens, awed by the city. Sparta had been little more than a rough and sprawling village, despite its military might and its position as chief power of the Peloponnesian League of cities.
Athens, in contrast, had fed well on its Delian League cities as its empire grew, and put up massive monuments and temples to the entire pantheon. Everywhere she looked, she gaped at marble steps, marble columns, imposing statues of heroes and gods, all of them masterfully cut and brightly painted.
No wonder Sparta feared this city, she thought. It looked like an imperial capital. According to King Archidamus, that was exactly what Athens had become, a provoker of wars so that it might conquer, a threat to civilization itself.
It was her job to destroy this city, and thereby save all of Greece from tyranny.
She rode in a two-wheeled cart drawn by a horse, and two other girls rode with her. The three of them had arrived by galley in Piraeus, the port of Athens. She and the other girls were heavily made up, lots of black around their eyes and dark red on their lips. They were allegedly slave girls from a distant island near Persia. The man driving the cart would sell them to a certain wealthy Athenian citizen who stocked his household with exotic women.